The world is changing, so should the financial services industry do. I am writing from personal interest in innovation and how the financial services industry could benefit from today's possibilities provided by technology and smart brains.

In society’s movement toward faceless and paperless digital transactions in all walks of commerce and life, the need to verify who we are and authorise transactions is increasing. For example, everyday many of us pay for things online. In the past we had to trust payment gateways with our credit card details and keep these details on us at all times. We had to fill out pesky direct debt slips and sign them and fax them off to administration facilities. However now we don’t need to do that. PayPal is the secure payment gateway that we trust. We enter our bank and card details and secure them with an alpha-numeric password in our PayPal account.

Similarly “proving” who we are has evolved as a laborious task. While 100 years ago a birth certificate and or identity card proved who we were, now we have a complex web of proving our identities; proof of age cards, birth certificates, drivers licences, passports, visas, passwords, PIN numbers, Tax File Numbers, fingerprints, CAPTCHAs…

Not only do we need to prove who we are to obtain an ID, we also need to continue to use ID after ID, to prove who we are and to multiple organisations.

The administration alone of maintaining current identification status quos is laborious. Adding to this the widening ages and literacy levels of those transacting online and the need for simple identification solutions becomes very apparent. Continue reading →

I was lucky to be able to attend the Customer Experience Design & Implementation conference in Sydney last week listening to and speaking with organisations as each shared their experiences, success stories (of course) and learnings (can’t be enough) from organisations covering (but not limited to) Telco’s, Financial services, Age-care, Government, Recruitment, Logistics, Design, Technology vendors, Fintech and Startups.

It was great to hear the variety of ways organisations make an effort to improve customer experiences across different industries. Such perspective across industries becomes increasingly valuable as many of the experiences people have to one industry drive their expectations and perception of others. As a result, a glass ceiling is put over industries with lower maturity levels in regards to customer experience and related expectations. From my view, which focuses on financial services and wealth management, those industries with lower customer experience maturity levels must play ‘maturity catch up’ versus other more established industries and/or organisations.

Why wealth managers without an integrated digital offering are out of play

My last blog is already been quite a few weeks ago. It has been very busy on all fronts, but not with blogging on SocialFS. A recent visit to Hong Kong as well as several conversations with many interesting people in the wealth management industry from Europe, North America and Australia formed some interesting views around the use of digital tools within the wealth management industry.

Soon from now we might end up saying that wealth managers that are not meeting HNWI demands regarding digital are out of play. I had the honor to present the World Wealth Report in Hong Kong in June. This report shows that an average of 65% of the HNWI population across all age groups and wealth bands are thinking of leaving their wealth management firm when there is a lack of digital (enabled) services. For the younger HNWI population this is even 80%. This research has been conducted among over 4500 HNWI globally.

The report also shows that there is an increase in the preference for digital contact versus a decline on direct contact. (Please see the figure below).

In short; The research describes the fact that good personal financial advice is preferred over digital interactions with customers. They are surprised by the fact that in the younger age group the digital experience score is lower than for ‘older HNWI’s’. To me this is not surprising at all due to the higher demand this group has towards digital. So the same experience scores lower within the younger age group.

Capgemini’s World Wealth Report 2013, based on research over 4400 HNWI’s globally, clearly shows the growing importance of these digital interactions. One of the key messages: The younger the group of HNWI’s researched, the higher the importance of digital contact is to them.

… About the important role of digitisation in the segmentation strategy for wealth managers and their clients…

In the past I have written about the importance of the right segmentation strategy for wealth management firms and private banks. The segmentation subject sometimes has a negative undertone. Reading quite some angry comments on blogs that are discussing the impact of digitisation on levels of service from the negative side or what they call ‘reduced services’. I would like to use this blog to discuss the important role digitisation has in a segmentation strategy for the wealth manager and the added value to their clients.

Historically wealth managers (and banks in general) segment their clients primarily based on Assets Under Management. Advisers look into CRM systems and refer to conversations they previously have had (although this probably is captured in the CRM systems), to define the strategy how to approach the clients. Is the client an entrepreneur, a doctor or politician? This is how their segmentation is done. Of course I describe this very ‘black and white’, but Scorpio Partnership highlighted this recently as well. ‘Too rigid’? Oh Yes!

For this blog I had the honor to interview B. Joseph Pine II. Author of several best-selling management books around Customization and Experience, speaker at TEDx conferences and contributor to several research papers for the Harvard Business Review. During my last blog I discussed customization of banking services and referred to his thinking already. This blog therefore is an interesting follow-up on that.

I used the inputs from this interview across my blog and want to thank Joe Pine for his contributions at the beginning of my blog.

History

Banking in the past was perceived as something for very smart guys and customers missed the understanding of it. They really needed their bank and its advisors to manage their cash. Today the world looks different. The (product) information is freely available and written in a more understandable way. Customers are looking more at how and when they do their banking. The customers know what is possible and expect it to be delivered in a simple and seamless way. Banks seem to understand that they need not only their customers’ money but the customers in person too!

Although this change is widely accepted and we regularly stepping over to it quickly in our publications, it is interesting to understand how this evolvement took place so quickly. With 2008’s financial crisis and the Smartphone development we have the 2 key components together.

Trust in banks went to an all time low during and after the financial crisis with customers that wanted to be much closer involved in management of their financials. Although we experience a strong increase in customers trust towards banks again, customers will never ever let them act stand alone anymore. They will always be more closely involved than pre-2008 levels.

This is partly due to the fact that they can easily connect with their bank online or by mobile. The ease and speed of those channels make the barriers almost disappearing to do so. What does this mean for customer experience anno 2014?

Yesterday I came across something called Trōv. An environment in the cloud providing collection services of all your assets. It not only provides a nice picture, but values it, offers insurance possibilities and advises on opportunities to use your products or holidays. You even can borrow or sell your products!

You have to become a member to receive exclusive benefits from Trōv partners who bring offers in insurance, finance, on-line consignment, auction, specialized services. Looking at their website, most of them are luxury services. So yes this service is specifically focused on High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI’s). Trōv uses all the information you provide and structures it to come up with their advice of opportunities.

The world is changing, so should the financial services industry do. I am writing from personal interest in innovation and how the financial services industry could benefit from today's possibilities provided by technology and smart brains.

The world is changing, so should the financial services industry do. I am writing from personal interest in innovation and how the financial services industry could benefit from today's possibilities provided by technology and smart brains.

The world is changing, so should the financial services industry do. I am writing from personal interest in innovation and how the financial services industry could benefit from today's possibilities provided by technology and smart brains.

The world is changing, so should the financial services industry do. I am writing from personal interest in innovation and how the financial services industry could benefit from today's possibilities provided by technology and smart brains.

The world is changing, so should the financial services industry do. I am writing from personal interest in innovation and how the financial services industry could benefit from today's possibilities provided by technology and smart brains.